After months of wait, GPT-5 may have made its first public appearance. On Sunday, August 3, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted a screenshot on X showing an interaction with the highly anticipated large language model (LLM).
The post showed Altman asking GPT-5, ‘What is the most thought-provoking show about AI?’ to which the model responded with high praise for the science fiction series ‘Pantheon’.
turns out yes! pic.twitter.com/yVsZXKSmKR
— Sam Altman (@sama) August 3, 2025
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According to GPT-5, Pantheon is “cerebral, emotional, and philosophically intense” and holds a “100% critic rating on Rotten Tomatoes.”
The animated series does have a 100 per cent critic rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Similar words appear in the reviews of the show. One review calls it “gripping, cerebral, remarkably high-concept.”
GPT-5 is said to have a larger context window than its predecessors. As a result, it is capable of handling more agentic tasks and comes with multimodal capabilities. GPT-5 is also widely rumoured to be adept at coding.
The upcoming launch of GPT-5 comes at a time when OpenAI is facing significant pressure from its competitors who have launched new iterations of AI models over the past few months such as Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro , XAI’s Grok 4, and Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.
However, ChatGPT continues to witness substantial growth with the AI chatbot platform on track to reach 700 million weekly users this week, according to Nick Turley, a vice president at OpenAI and head of the ChatGPT app.
This week, ChatGPT is on track to reach 700M weekly active users — up from 500M at the end of March and 4× since last year. Every day, people and teams are learning, creating, and solving harder problems. Big week ahead. Grateful to the team for making ChatGPT more useful and…
— Nick Turley (@nickaturley) August 4, 2025
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“Every day, people and teams are learning, creating, and solving harder problems. Big week ahead. Grateful to the team for making ChatGPT more useful and delivering on our mission so everyone can benefit from AI,” Turley said in a post on X.
Its popularity surged in March this year after OpenAI integrated an image generation feature into ChatGPT that kicked off the viral Ghibli trend on social media.
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OpenAI chief operating officer Brad Lightcap stated that more than 130 million users generated over 700 million images after launching the image generation feature. Its active user base grew to 500 million that month.
Furthermore, the number of ChatGPT subscribers has also increased. According to Lightcap, paying corporate customers on ChatGPT rose from 3 million in June to 5 million last week.
ChatGPT users utilise the app more than 12 days each month on average, ranking second only to Google and X, according to data from SensorTower. It also found that users spent an average of 16 minutes per day on the AI chatbot app in the first half of 2025.